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judgment

It is a sad state of affairs that we live in an age where propagandist media can affect our ability to make sound judgments about the current world affairs. We are bombarded with information on a daily basis, whether it be from a website we believe reputable, or from a friend quoting statistics he found from a Facebook article.

“Fake news” has become quite the buzzword lately and for good reason: With the fight for ad revenue promoting a culture of clickbait articles, jumping-the-gun journalism, and over-sensationalism, websites are becoming more and more about getting the traffic any way they can, the quality of content be damned.

Our culture of looking to be the next thing to go viral so we can score the big paycheck has some of us doing unwholesome activities.

The truth is, however, propaganda, misinformation, and deliberately faking information to get a rise and attention has been around for ages. With the growth of the internet, the growth of this kind of media has also flourished.

Imagine for a moment a terrible idea: Wikipedia.org edited entirely by one person. That’s right, only one person allowed to make changes to a page, to build the pages, to find the relevant sources and present the information.

Surely, under these circumstances the website would be much less than what it currently is. We can imagine many things that would ail a site such as this:

Incomplete pages

Poor sources

Bad representation of information

Very small amount of pages

Not up to date with current trends, information, news

Possibility of significant bias

This list could go on and on. Sure, someone may argue that the current Wikipedia is plagued by some of the things on this list to a smaller extent but definitely not to the level of our imaginative scenario.

Feedback is one of the most important things to measure when it comes to self improvement. It allows us to see whether or not the work we put in is actually doing something. We get feedback from all kinds of sources:

Coworkers

Friends

Family

Bosses

Technology

When that feedback acts as a guide for our further actions, it creates a loop. This loop can either help to maintain a good thing (like homeostasis) or help you improve at something (creating a good habit).